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  For Young and his mates, the romance of their journey was soon replaced by the realities of life on a dangerous body of water. There were mosquitoes to infuriate them all day and night. The fetid banks stank of rot and vegetation. The current was sometimes languid, sometimes swirling. When Young made the lazy right turn from the Zambezi into the narrower, serpentine Shire, the complexion of their journey changed, too. The Shire was a river of contrasts—miles of impassable rapids and miles of equally daunting marsh, choked with tall grasses. So many elephants wallowed in the shallows of the marsh that Livingstone once, because firewood was scarce in the great Shire marsh, had ordered the men to pluck elephant bones from the river and burn them as fuel in his ship's boiler. More ominously, the Shire was so thick with crocodiles that Livingstone's men during the Zambezi expedition called it “a river of death.”

  Young and his companions pushed up the Shire, reaching Murchison Falls on August 19. There, they spent five days taking Search apart. Those were nervous times for Young. Not only would the loss or damage of a single piece of Search render the boat useless, but also reports from local villagers confirmed that the Mazitu lurked somewhere nearby. Time hadn't made them any more docile. Young quickly hired two hundred and forty men from the Makololo tribe to carry the pieces of Search up the falls. The journey took four and a half days and there were no signs that the Mazitu had followed.

  Clues about Livingstone's fate began to emerge as the expedition neared Lake Nyassa. Twelve months before, a white man stopped at the village of Maponda for a few days' rest. Members of the Makololo tribe hadn't heard about a white man being ambushed, and laughed out loud at the notion that such a thing could happen without word getting around, for the bush telegraph was too effective.

  On Lake Nyassa, more telling clues. In one small village, Young purchased English-made tokens a white man had traded with the people—a knife, a razor, a spoon, a length of frayed calico, a book of English Common Prayer. All appeared to be Livingstone's, but there was no sign of him and no one knew which way he'd gone.

  On September 14 Search was caught in a gale and sought refuge in a small village on the shore. As the men stepped from the boat, they were reminded again that that Mazitu were close. The huts were all empty, there was no wood smoke from cooking fires, and there were no shouts of children playing. “Skeletons,” Young wrote, “now met our eyes in great numbers.” The few villagers still alive knew of a white man, but said he was long dead. Young and the men rested until the wind died, then fled the ghost town to continue their detective work elsewhere.

  Five days later Search steered toward the large village whose chief's name was Marenga. As the boat prepared to dock, Young and the men were originally mistaken for Portuguese slavers. Warriors lined the beach with guns aimed at Search, hoping to drive the boat away. But when Young cried out that they were Englishmen, the guns were lowered and the expedition was welcomed warmly. Chief Marenga rushed forward to greet the boat. Shaking Young's hand profusely, he asked, “Where have you come from and where is your brother that was here last year?”

  When Young eagerly told Marenga of his search for the missing explorer, he was regaled with stories of Livingstone's visit. “He said he had come there from Maponda,” Young wrote, “had stopped there two days. He was very kind.”

  Search sailed on, combing the southernmost shores of Nyassa for clues. What became clear to Young was that Livingstone had traveled along these same shores to elude the Mazitu. He had not traveled north around the lake as originally planned—and as Musa had sworn. Clearly, Livingstone didn't die like Musa said, because he'd never traveled anywhere near the scene of his alleged death. Weighing that logic, Young was sure Livingstone lived.

  Now Young was faced with a dilemma. Clause nine of his orders from the Royal Geographical Society gave him the option of pressing forward to make contact with Livingstone or turning around once he had verified the explorer was alive.

  Young turned around. He had Livingstone's personal effects to show the RGS, and first-person testimony from locals that Livingstone was living. More so, Young was a creature of his training—after a lifetime on the water, the career sailor was incapable of tracking Livingstone over land. The mission, as far as Young was concerned, was accomplished. The journey home began.

  By October 2 Young was disassembling Search for the portage back down the cataracts. By December 2 he and his men rendezvoused with HMS Raccoon at the mouth of the Zambezi. By December 17 they were in Cape Town. On December 19 they boarded Celt once again for the cruise to London. And on January 27, 1868, just ten months after the fit of pique prompting the impossible adventure, E. D. Young's official expedition report was read at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. “I have the honor to be, Sir, your very obedient servant,” it concluded.

  “How thoroughly and sincerely the whole British nation rejoiced at the good news of our great explorer's safety,” botanist H. G. Adams exulted.

  Young hadn't explored anything, and he hadn't laid eyes on Livingstone. But if ever there was a perfect expedition, Young's was it. There were no casualties. Livingstone was shown to be alive. Based on Young's findings the Sultan of Johanna sentenced Musa to be thrown in chains for a period of eight months. And Young and his compatriots were lionized as heroes. Given voice by his success, Young was empowered to speak out about Livingstone's place in history. “His extensive travels,” Young concluded, “place him at the head of modern explorers, for no one has dared penetrate where he had been. No one has, through a lengthy series of years, devoted so much of his life to seeking out tribes hitherto unknown. I believe his equal will rarely, if ever, be found in one particular and essential characteristic of the true explorer.”

  Gunner E. D. Young's audacious adventure came to a close. In the amazing year of 1867, when America purchased Alaska from Russia, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, and Karl Marx published Das Kapital, the accomplishments of an ambitious gunner from Portsmouth grabbed a healthy share of the headlines. Young's journey was important because it showed Britain that she didn't need to worry about Livingstone. He would bash on, regardless, someday to return.

  • CHAPTER 5 •

  The Herald

  December 1867

  New York

  8,000 Miles to Livingstone

  New York was damp and bitter cold. Christmas was just five days away. Snow had fallen since early morning as Henry Morton Stanley, fresh off the train from the Great Plains, prowled the cobbled streets of Lower Manhattan, seeking the newspaper job that would at last place him in the highest echelon of American journalism. All around him, New York exuded promise, political corruption, and arrogance; old money, new money, gangs, and immigrants. It was an upstart city, longing to find its place on the international stage, keeping one preening eye on itself, while insecurely monitoring the rest of the world with the other.

  The morning papers for December 20 exemplified that deference for Old World over New: British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the battle for Irish Home Rule was the lead headline, while stories about America's Fortieth Congress and post–Civil War Southern reconstruction were relegated to column space farther down the front page.

  If the disparate factions inhabiting the city had a collective voice, however, it was those same newspapers. An astounding eleven dailies battled for readers. Editors were more powerful than politicians and more famous than actors. A sharply worded editorial had the power to make careers and ruin lives. And while established titans like the Sun's Charles A. Dana, Abraham Lincoln's assistant secretary of war, and the Tribune's Horace Greeley, of “go West, young man” fame, dominated the landscape, the most popular newspaper in all New York, selling sixty thousand copies each day, was the New York Herald. Readers didn't mind that the Herald was more expensive than its competitors—its nickel price a penny more than the Times and three pennies more than the Sun. The Herald's combination of hard journalism, sensationalism, and bizarre human-interest stories was worth the extra cent. The pe
rsonal ads placed by the city's prostitutes didn't hurt any, either.

  The Herald was Stanley's destination. Its headquarters was at the corner of Broadway and Ann, in a bright white building that looked very much like a French château. He was emboldened by the knowledge that his coverage of the American Indian Wars for the Missouri Democrat during the spring and summer had been so powerful dozens of other American newspapers—the Herald among them—had picked the articles up. The minor renown of being the journalistic voice of the Indian Wars had allowed Stanley to rub elbows with men of accomplishment: American heroes such as General Ulysses S. Grant, General William Tecumseh Sherman, General George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, and “Wild Bill” Hickock, who threw a saloon patron over a pool table after the man insulted Stanley. It was a minor, temporary elevation in societal status, but a great motivator. Stanley had become impatient to leave the isolation and anonymity of the prairie once and for all, and so he impulsively quit the Democrat in the fall of 1867. He took the train to New York, ready and willing to pit his journalistic skills against the best reporters in the business.

  Stanley didn't have an appointment with James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Herald's infamous young editor, as he approached the corner of Broadway and Ann. Nor did Stanley hold a letter of recommendation that might help him win a job. All Stanley had—all he ever had, through good times and bad—was determination, bluster, and an almost masochistic ability to endure rejection. Each quality, in its own way, made Stanley fearless.

  He would need those qualities in abundance, for Bennett was equal parts genius and ass. Tall and without muscle, an icy-gazed whippet with a thick brown mustache hiding his upper lip, the twenty-six-year-old Bennett raced horses until they collapsed beneath him and fired reporters for something as simple as a bad haircut. He was so rich he once threw a bulky wad of cash into a fireplace because it interfered with the cut of his suit. Bennett was a lightweight who drank to excess, a loner who terrorized his Manhattan neighbors by driving his coach and four naked at midnight, and a brawler who fought with a passion beyond his ability. He was an adventurer, too. Once, Bennett raced his yacht across the Atlantic in the dead of winter on a drunken bet. It was the first ever transatlantic sailboat race. He won.

  Bennett was, without a doubt, the enfant terrible of the New York publishing world. Ironically, the same combination of arrogance, fondness for risk, and embrace of change that made Bennett socially infamous also made him a phenomenal newspaperman. He was willing to do whatever it took to win New York's daily circulation wars. “I want you fellows to remember,” Bennett once lectured his staff, “that I am the only one to be pleased. If I want the Herald to be turned upside down, it must be turned upside down.”

  Bennett ordered layouts and fonts altered in order to help the reader's eye track down the page easier. He increased the paper's heft by expanding international coverage. The bylines of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane graced the Herald's columns.

  Most important, Bennett revolutionized the concept of newsgathering by creating “exclusives”—a one-of-a-kind story no other newspaper was bold enough to cover. “A great editor,” Bennett believed, “is one who knows where hell is going to break loose next and how to get a reporter first on the scene.” To that end, he would invest thousands of dollars in a piece, knowing the payoff might not come for years, or at all.

  But much of the time it did. The result was a monstrous $750,000 annual profit, even after Bennett's million-dollar salary. Bennett plowed it all back into the newspaper. He sent reporters to Asia and Europe in search of stories that would generate a groundswell of public opinion and generate a news cycle. When the transatlantic cable was perfected in 1866, he gladly paid for the quicker news it provided. Once, when a reporter cabled back the entire contents of a speech given by the King of Prussia, it cost Bennett seven thousand dollars.

  “No rival journalists dared go to bed before seeing a copy of the early edition of the Herald,” Oswald Gatrison Villard of the Evening Post wrote, “which they picked up in fear and trembling lest they find in it one of those record-breaking stories which made its name as famous as that of The Thunderer in every corner of the globe.”

  It was small wonder, then, that Stanley would want to write for the Herald. When he arrived at the building, Stanley wandered the hallways until he located Bennett's office. Then, as if Bennett were the editor of a small newspaper of no consequence, Stanley talked his way past Bennett's secretary and found himself face-to-face with the publisher of America's most popular newspaper.

  Stanley quickly introduced himself. He wrote later that he was surprised when Bennett admitted to having read—and enjoyed—his dispatches from the Indian Wars. But Stanley was rebuffed when he asked for work. “I wish I could offer you something permanent,” Bennett lamented, preparing to brush Stanley off, “for we want active men like you.”

  Stanley, however, had planned for such a dismissal. Instead of marching back out the door into the cold December air, Stanley—in words that he later wrote down verbatim—parried. “You are very kind to say so, and I am emboldened to ask you if I could not offer myself for this Abyssinian campaign.”

  “I do not think this Abyssinian expedition is of sufficient interest to Americans,” said Bennett, before slyly inquiring, “On what terms would you go?”

  That was the opening Stanley had been waiting for. He quickly laid out a plan to travel to Abyssinia, a land of desert and mountains situated on the horn of Africa, and cover an escalating hostage crisis. Theodore, Emperor of Abyssinia, a man with a history of mental illness, had imprisoned sixty-seven British diplomats and their one hundred and eighty-seven dependents in Magdala, his mountain stronghold. The British Army would soon march inland to rescue them. Stanley would accompany the British on their march, then write about the heroic rescue. Covering the British Army in Africa wouldn't be too different than covering the American Army in Kansas. The scenario, Stanley argued, seemed perfect for a segue from the national to international stage.

  Stanley offered to work without a contract, covering his own expenses. He would stand or fall based on his professional merits. If Bennett liked the stories and the Herald printed them, he would be paid by the letter for the exclusive. Otherwise, Stanley would absorb the loss. Bennett was being offered a no-lose situation.

  The editor agreed. If only on a trial basis, Stanley was officially a reporter for the New York Herald. On December 22, 1867, Stanley boarded the steamer Hecla, bound for Europe. By New Year's Day he was in Paris. A month later, Stanley found himself in Annesley Bay on the Red Sea, where he linked up with the British expeditionary force about to march inland to Magdala.

  What followed was a journalistic tour de force.

  Not only were Stanley's missives brilliant, but through foresight and sheer luck, he scooped the British journalists who were also covering the campaign. After the British military force under General Sir Robert Napier rescued the hostages and killed Theodore in the process, Stanley raced back to the Suez to send his stories to the world via telegraph.

  Luckily, before the initial march to Magdala had begun, Stanley had had the forethought to bribe the lone telegraph operator in Suez. Thus Stanley ensured that his dispatches would be sent across the wire before other journalists'. By a stroke of luck, not only did the telegraph operator send Stanley's work before any of the British writers, but the underwater telegraph cable mysteriously broke before any other stories could be sent.

  New Yorkers, much to the embarrassment of papers like the Times of London, received word of the British Army's triumph before Londoners. Angry British editorials called Stanley a liar, saying he had made up the stories, finding it impossible an American could outdo their best war correspondents. But when writers from the Telegraph, Times, and Standard finally got their stories to London a week later, Stanley was exonerated. “Here is the Times, which for half a century has beaten every journal in Europe in energy and enterprise, actually publishing the latest news
of a British expedition through the favor of a London correspondent of the New York Herald,” London's Spectator marveled, framing Stanley's achievement.

  Stanley's writing style was purple and intimate, as if penning a letter to a dear friend he was trying to impress. The sentences were meandering, sparsely punctuated, sometimes lazily crafted—yet always evocative. Stanley's true brilliance lay in getting the story first, getting it right, and getting it no matter what the cost. “Our readers will not fail to perceive the vast superiority in style of writing, minuteness of detail and graphic portrayal of events which the Herald correspondence possesses over the same matter printed in the London journals,” a Herald editorial boasted of Stanley's Abyssinia pieces.

  Abyssinia made Stanley's reputation. More than impressed by the upstart journalist's ingenuity and pluck, Bennett hired Henry Morton Stanley as the Herald's new roving correspondent, to be based out of the London bureau. His assignment: to go anywhere he was ordered.

  • CHAPTER 6 •

  Two Years

  March 1868

  Cazembe, Africa

  “A very beautiful young woman came to look at us, perfect in every way, and nearly naked but unconscious of indecency—a very Venus in black,” Livingstone wrote on March 18, 1868.

  A day later, his very next journal entry read, “Grant, Lord, grace to love Thee more, and serve Thee better.” Together, in words notable for their honesty and simplicity, the entries dovetailed Livingstone's barely suppressed sexuality and unashamed spirituality within the span of just two sentences. The date was March 19. It was his fifty-fifth birthday and the second anniversary of the start of his search for the source.

  In the year and a half since Musa and the Johanna men had abandoned him, Livingstone's caravan had experienced extreme hardships—but not, as those in England had believed, death. Yet his prediction that he would return home in two years was not to be. Livingstone was now deep in Africa, on the banks of the Lualaba—a mighty river similar in appearance to his beloved Zambezi. And though Livingstone was growing weary, he felt the source was almost his. He felt confident there was a connection between the Lualaba and the Nile—a connection that would prove his theory about a chain of lakes and rivers coursing north from the southern reaches of Africa all the way into the Mediterranean.